Even the emperor was all ears now. He and the other three dinosaurs waited patiently for the security minister to get to his punchline.
‘There was a particularly clever gang of ant thieves at large and the bank knew it would be targeted sooner or later. So the manager installed a number of highly sophisticated super-sensitive gas detectors inside the vault. The idea being that as the ants drilled through the wall, trace amounts of air would leak in from the outside, triggering the sensors and setting off the alarm. But blow me down, do you think that worked? Did it hell!’
The minister narrowed his eyes and drew himself up tall as he finally got to the point of his tale. ‘No! Those damned critters still managed to rob the vault without setting off the alarm. And they left no discernible evidence, not a whit. But I tell you what I think – I suspect those crafty buggers mounted a miniature vacuum chamber to the vault’s exterior wall before they started drilling. That way, no air leaked in, no air leaked out. Be under no illusion, my friends, the ants’ cunning is far beyond what we can imagine. And their tiny size gives them an enormous advantage. No way can we secure the massive buildings of our cities with ant-proof seals. It’s impossible.’
Emperor Dadaeus was not going to be fobbed off that easily. ‘But can the servers themselves not be hermetically sealed to prevent the ants sabotaging them?’ he asked.
‘That is difficult, too, Your Majesty,’ the security minister replied. ‘For a start, the servers require certain holes in order to be able to operate – holes like vents, cable openings and disk drives, for example. And, as you know, ants are excellent borers and have any number of tiny but powerful tools for drilling quickly through all sorts of materials – a legacy from their nest-dwelling days. To truly guarantee the security of our machines, the only effective method is to check, double-check and triple-check. Which means’ – he turned to the lead engineer and chief security officer – ‘that there cannot and must not be any let-up in vigilance. Even a momentary lapse in concentration could have dire consequences,’ he said darkly. ‘Is that understood?’
‘Yes, Minister!’ the two dinosaurs shouted in unison, standing to attention.
The minister’s gaze now settled on a server to his right. ‘Inspect this machine,’ he commanded.
The chief security officer said something into her two-way radio and five dinosaur engineers immediately hurried over, armed with flashlights, magnifying glasses and other tools, as well as two specialised instruments. The engineers opened the cabinet door and began to carefully inspect the interior. This was no easy task. The wiring and components inside the server formed a tangled knot, and the dinosaurs had to pore over it with their magnifying glasses as if they were reading a long, convoluted essay or wandering through a complicated maze.
Just as Dadaeus and his ministers were beginning to get impatient, one of the engineers shouted, ‘Oh, I’ve found something! It’s a mine-grain.’ He passed the magnifying glass to Dadaeus. ‘Your Majesty, it’s right there, on that green wire.’
The emperor peered through the magnifying glass and gave a satisfied grunt. Another dinosaur pulled out a pen-shaped object – a miniature vacuum cleaner – and pressed the nib to the wire. With the flick of a switch, the little yellow pellet was sucked up off the wire.
‘Well done!’ The security minister patted the engineer on the shoulder, then turned to Dadaeus. ‘Your Majesty, this dummy mine-grain was placed there on my orders, to test the effectiveness of the centre’s security-inspection process.’
‘Hmph!’ Dadaeus was unimpressed. ‘I have my doubts about the efficacy of all this.’ He flicked an imperious claw in the direction of a magnifying glass. ‘It’s all so suffocatingly small! As you say, the ants are little and devious. If they are determined to cause havoc, it’ll be very difficult to beat them at their own game. No, the most effective way to counter the ant menace is by threatening full-on retaliation. They need look no further than the decimation of their two greatest cities. That’s the sort of deterrent the Ant Federation understands. Am I not right?’
He glowered at his ministers, daring them to contradict him, then carried on.
‘They have learnt to their cost that their world is nothing but a toy sandpit to us. They know we could destroy every single remaining ant city on Earth in just a couple of days. And now that they do know that, they will not dare organise any acts of sabotage against our world. They are entirely rational creatures and their actions are governed by dispassionate, mechanical considerations. That kind of thinking does not allow them to take unfavourable risks.’
‘Your Majesty, there is certainly truth in what you say,’ replied Interior Minister Babat hesitantly, ‘but yesterday evening I had a nightmare that alerted me to another possible scenario.’
‘You seem to have been having quite a few nightmares of late.’
‘That’s because my intuition tells me we are in very real danger. Your Majesty, the empire’s deterrence strategy is founded on the premise that if the ants were to destroy a part of our dinosaur world, another part of our world would then launch a devastating second strike against them. But what if the ants target every corner of the dinosaur world simultaneously, in a single coordinated attack? If they do that, we won’t be able to retaliate. In that sort of scenario, our… um… deterrence strategy will be… um… non-existent.’
Dadaeus gave his nervy minister’s comments a nanosecond’s thought then shook his head. ‘The situation you’ve described is merely theoretical. It’s a worst-case scenario that will never happen.’
‘But, Your Majesty, that’s how the ants operate: as long as the theoretical possibility for a course of action exists, they will attempt it. That’s the flipside of their mechanical way of thinking. In their simplistic estimation, nothing is too crazy.’
‘I have to disagree with you on that, Babat. I still think it’s unlikely to happen. Besides, the empire’s security measures are pretty damn rigorous. If the ants were planning a full-scale operation, we’d notice pretty quick. What worries me now isn’t the ants – it’s those Laurasians. They’re becoming more and more of a threat to us Gondwanans.’
Besides the dinosaurs assembled in the server room, Dadaeus had another audience: twelve soldier ants hidden beneath the motherboard of the server the engineer had just examined. Five hours earlier, the ants had snuck into the Communications Tower via a water pipe, made their way into the server room through a tiny crack in the floor, then slipped through an air vent into the server itself. The security minister was correct. The ants could pass unimpeded through the dinosaurs’ massive buildings and machinery.
On hearing the dinosaurs approaching the server room, the ants had quickly ducked beneath their server’s motherboard, which was larger than the Ivory Citadel’s football stadium. They bunched together apprehensively as the door of the server cabinet crashed open. Gazing skywards through a small hole in the motherboard, all they could see was the lens of a magnifying glass and the grotesque eye of a dinosaur engineer distorted through it. The ants were terrified, but the dinosaur failed to spot them. Pretty soon, the engineer discovered the fake mine-grain that the minister had hidden, but he entirely failed to see the real mine-grain that the ants had just planted alongside it. The tiny chameleon mine had already taken on the hue of the wire it was wrapped around, making it effectively undetectable. A dozen further chameleon mines were wrapped around other wires of varying colours and thicknesses in the immediate vicinity.